Open Innovation Platforms for Automobiles and Mobility SolutionsVenkatesh Prasad, Ford Motor Company, United States

Energy Internet - The Challenge of Smart Micro-Grids

Paolo TentiUniversity of PadovaItaly

Brief BioPaolo Tenti is professor of Electronics at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova, Italy. His main interests are industrial and power electronics and electromagnetic compatibility. His research focuses on application of modern control methods to power electronics, EMC analysis of electronic equipment and cooperative control of distributed electronic power processors in smart grids.From 1991 to 2000 Paolo Tenti was as a member of the Executive Board of the IEEE Industry Applications Society and chaired various Society Committees. In 1997 he served as IEEE IAS President.In 2000 he chaired the IEEE World Conference on Industrial Applications of Electrical Energy in Rome. For the years 2000-2001 was appointed IEEE-IAS Distinguished Lecturer on “Electromagnetic compatibility in industrial equipment”.From 2002 to 2008 he served the University of Padova in the capability of Department Director and Chairman of the Board of Directors.He has been principal investigator and coordinator of several research programs funded by private companies and public agencies, and serves as a member of evaluation boards of national and international research programs.Paolo Tenti is a Fellow of the IEEE and was awarded the IEEE Millennium Medal. He is also President of CREIVen, an industrial consortium for research in industrial electronics with special emphasis on electromagnetic compatibility.

AbstractLow-voltage distribution grids are experiencing an increasing proliferation of small-power energy sources (mostly PV units) owned by domestic end-users (prosumers, i.e., at the same time producers and consumers).The current regulations enforce prosumers to feed their generated energy into the grid, and to disconnect if the grid parameters (voltage, frequency) outgo a given interval. These simple rules, however, misbehave in a situation, as the one currently experienced in Italy, where the installed PV power amounts to 20 GW and exceeds 12% of the total energy production. A smarter and more efficient management of the large amount of small energy contributions powered by prosumers requires a radical innovation of the operation codes in lowvoltage distribution grids.In particular, implementing energy and data networking among the prosumers of a residential community allows the creation of smart micro-grids, which means sharing of resources among the entire community, trusted operation of the low-voltage grid, and aggregation of prosumers to empower their role versus other players of the electrical market (DSOs, utilities, traders, etc.). This gives rise to a new paradigm (the Internet of Energy) whereby communities of prosumers can implement peer-to-peer resource sharing, define common visions and strategies, organize themselves at various levels of aggregation, and play an authoritative role in the electrical market.Individually, each prosumer can benefit of: modulation of generated and consumed power along the day, to take advantage of hourly tariffs; uninterruptible supply of domestic loads, even in case of grid failure; improved stabilization of local voltage; capability to feed power on-demand, based on request conveyed by the smart meter.As a whole, smart micro-grids can provide: easy and flexible integration of renewable sources and storage devices; pervasive use of upfront ICT and power electronics technologies; reduction of carbon footprint; increase of distribution efficiency; savings for end-users and distributors; improved quality and reliability of electrical services; better exploitation of the electrical infrastructure. Moreover, the ICT platform will spur new services to the customers, and new roles and market shares for public administrations, utilities, traders, DSOs and territorial bodies.

Guidelines for Eco-friendly Data Centres - Lessons learnt in Three European Research Projects on Data Centres Energy Savings

Giovanni GiulianiHP Italy Innovation CentreItaly

Brief BioGraduated in Electronics Engineering with honors in 1982, Giovanni Giuliani is Master Architect at HP. In the last decade he has been involved in several research projects funded by European Commission in the area of Mobility, e-Collaboration and Cloud Computing. In 2005 he joined the HP Italy Innovation Center, where he’s been leading the Cloud Computing Initiative since 2009. Starting from 2013 he serves as Lead Architect of the HP LIFE platform (HP worldwide program offering a cloud based e-learning initiative for entrepreneurs).Giovanni Giuliani is also the technical coordinator of DC4Cities EU FP7 project (follow-up project of FIT4Green and All4Green), which promotes adaptive data centers policies that affect the energy consumption through the interaction with lower level subsystems.

AbstractData centres are becoming the key infrastructure elements in Smart Cities programs, as well as the foundation for any IoT and Big Data platform. The data centres are therefore - on one side - supporting in general the growth of ICT services, but - on the other side - are becoming more and more large energy consumers and contributors to GHG emissions. Also, some data centres tend to move back into (or nearby) the cities for reasons like avoiding network latency issues of critical real-time interactive applications, whereas Smart Cities have tight objectives of environment sustainability and renewable energy utilization. Therefore, data centres must maximize their ability to run at minimal environmental impact and to exploit the presence of clean (renewable) energy sources.

During the last years, the European Commission co-funded several research projects on data centre energy efficiency: this talk will initially present a brief summary of three of them, i.e. FIT4Green, All4Green and DC4Cities. Finally, based on the lesson learnt in these and other parallel projects, a set of guidelines will be presented to supporting data centres becoming more eco-friendly: first introducing energy-awareness in the data centre management, then helping to identify and plan enhancements in logistics, hardware, software and operations, finally examining useful metrics to evaluate the improvements and environment impact.

About Monitoring

Barbara PerniciPolitecnico di MilanoItaly

Brief BioBarbara Pernici is full professor of Computer Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. Her research interests include workflow and information systems design, cooperative information systems, adaptive information systems, service engineering and web services, data quality, and computer based design support tools, green information systems. She has published more than 50 papers in international journals, co-edited 26 books, and published about 350 papers at international level. She served as elected chair of TC8 Information Systems of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and of IFIP WG 8.1 on Information Systems Design.

AbstractMany Smart* approaches are based on an underlying monitoring infrastructure for providing the basis for assessing the current context of the system being considered and for taking decisions about the possible actions to be performed to get a better performance or to reduce the impact of the system being controlled. The talk will discuss issues related to monitoring, referring in particular to the datacenter and cloud environments, but also extending the discussion also to ambient-assisted living, and in particular issues related to managing monitoring data and to the selection of the appropriate monitoring variables will be considered. The potential of using monitoring data across applications will also be discussed.

Open Innovation Platforms for Automobiles and Mobility Solutions

Venkatesh PrasadFord Motor CompanyUnited States

Brief BioK. Venkatesh Prasad is the founding leader of Ford Motor Company's Infotronics Technologies Research & Advanced Engineering Group, based at Ford's Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, Michigan. Prasad is responsible for the global activities of the Infotronics technology cluster, one of twelve such clusters within the Ford Research and Advanced Engineering (R&AE) Organization. In this capacity, Prasad oversees the research, architecture, standards, applications development and vehicle system integration of a broad spectrum of electrical, electronics & embedded software technologies.
Prasad received his formal education broadly in Electronics, Communications, & Computer Engineering from the NIT-Trichy, India (B.E., 1980), IIT-Madras, India (M.S., 1984), Washington State University, Pullman, WA (M.S., 1987) and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (Ph.D., 1990). Prasad is engaged in a number of professional society activities and is currently the associate editor of a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE on "The Advanced Automobile".

AbstractDuring the past five years Ford Motor Company has developed and used a number of platforms to reduce the barriers to innovation by both employee-innovators and third-parties. In this keynote, we will describe OpenXC, an open-source platform for developing software applications as well as accessories for automobiles. We will present examples of what has been created by the community using OpenXC and also show how it was used with several crowd-sourced innovation contest platforms to help shape solutions to mobility challenges in several locations around the world.